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Energy & Power

The Museum's collections on energy and power illuminate the role of fire, steam, wind, water, electricity, and the atom in the nation's history. The artifacts include wood-burning stoves, water turbines, and windmills, as well as steam, gas, and diesel engines. Oil-exploration and coal-mining equipment form part of these collections, along with a computer that controlled a power plant and even bubble chambers—a tool of physicists to study protons, electrons, and other charged particles.

A special strength of the collections lies in objects related to the history of electrical power, including generators, batteries, cables, transformers, and early photovoltaic cells. A group of Thomas Edison's earliest light bulbs are a precious treasure. Hundreds of other objects represent the innumerable uses of electricity, from streetlights and railway signals to microwave ovens and satellite equipment.

Charles Greeley Abbot (1872–1973), the second director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the fifth secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, spent his scientific career measuring the intensity of solar radiation and seeking to correlate solar changes with weather conditions on the earth. He was also interested in the practical use of solar radiation. This cooker, which he built in 1940, uses a cylindrical aluminum mirror that is mounted parallel to the earth's axis to collect solar energy and focus it on a pyrex tube that is filled with a chlorinated benzene ("arochlor"); the energy is then transmitted to a square oven in which cakes and cookies could be baked. Abbot obtained a patent (#2,247,830) on this cooker in 1941.

While many of the buttons in our collections were produced by environmental organizations, the causes they espouse are often advocated by government agencies. This button is a good example. It was made in Canada by the Alberta Energy and Natural Resources.

The group "Bike for a Better City" encouraged New York commuters and lawmakers to view bicycling as a means for everyday transportation. The organization, founded in 1970 by Barry Fishman and Harriet Green, called for the establishment of special bike lanes to make city biking safer.

Using this extremely fine wood model as part of its technical proposal, the Swiss firm Faesch & Piccard won the contract to design the original turbines for the Niagara Falls power station. The actual turbines were built by the I. P. Morris Company of Philadelphia and were installed in 1895, the year the Adams Station went on line. The hydroelectric power generation facility at Niagara Falls gained international acclaim for its ability to efficiently convert a portion of the Falls' awe-inspiring natural energy into electricity. This was the world's first large-scale central electric power station, demonstrating how falling water (or other power sources) could be used successfully to supply electricity over an extended geographical area.